No calculus in high school

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I'm not able to take calculus in high school because I was placed in Math Studies. Would taking calculus 1 at a local community college over the summer between graduation and college be a good idea? I want to be an mechanical or civil engineer. The other thing I could do is take Calculus online.

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Is calculus covered at all in the Math Studies curriculum? Because calculus is definitely important for engineering.

I've heard that many universities don't accept Math Studies for their engineering (and other) departments for IB students. Although if you take it online you may be able to count that instead of or in addition to Math Studies when applying for universities. You'll have to ask your school about your specific case though.

And yeah, if you're in the US I agree with Atheist about taking the AP Calculus exams, since I believe they are considered fairly important (but not always necessary, though recommended) for universities.

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Well... I taught myself Calculus online using Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare, which are both great resources. Although in your case it would probably be more of a supplementary thing since just following these courses on your own time probably wouldn't count for actual credit.

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Well... I taught myself Calculus online using Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare, which are both great resources. Although in your case it would probably be more of a supplementary thing since just following these courses on your own time probably wouldn't count for actual credit.

Well if you can understand it well enough by yourself then that is a positive sign. However, you need some sort of formal recognition of your calculus ability (AP calculus or a sumer course) other Universities might not accept you.

So I would suggest enrolling in AP calculus online, and order some textbooks/resources so you can do some practice and get good (you need to be able to apply your caculus knowledge - not just understand). However, if you think you need some additional tuition then it would be best to hire a math tutor or attend a summer school.

Ultimately you just need something that tells the University that you can do an appropriate level of math - namely calculus.